Byzantine Apse Mosaic (c.805 AD)

This beautiful and unique composition has no parallel in France and was almost certainly done by an artist from the East; perhaps he had fled west to escape the iconoclasts of that period. The mosaic is made of glass cubes and colored stone, primarily in the colors of gold, black and blue. Its composition is highly symmetrical and quite beautiful. The style shows similarities with mosaics in Greece, Jordan and the 5th-century Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome (which, notably, Theodulf had visited just a few years earlier).